The Truth About Marika is a mixed reality game produced by The Company P and employing research and technology by the Interactive Institute Sweden, The Integrated Pervasive Gaming Project, and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.
The project is multilayered game employing the ‘This is not a game ‘ gambit to evoke a rich immersive game space that allowed the national broadcaster to develop a new intimate relationship with its viewers -’reaching audiences that have left the Sofa for the Keyboard’. The Truth About Marika was based on a traditional TV Drama. Before the premier of the television show a women made the public claim that SVT has stolen the story of her missing friend for the Drama Series and was part of a cover up. Her blog became the online section of the game space as viewers/participants looked for collected and shared clues to the missing girls story which were planted in the Drama Series and in Virtual and Actual worlds – the third plane of the game space. Talk Shows were staged including the shows producers, their accuser, and other protagonists. Printed QR codes were posted in locations for discovery via mobiles. Geospatial information was gleaned via google mappings of clues.
The project might be seen as model for creating television media, broadcast media, and perhaps narrative media more generally that is event driven and therefore makes good use of the relative difference that broadcast media displays in relation to network based content delivery platforms.
This might be related to the more simple and serendipitous rise of twitter as a backchannel for television. The real-time qualities of twitter and broadcast media appear particularly well aligned -each adding another dimension to the other.